On the Blog Again...

So last summer I took an unexpected break from blogging for a couple overwhelmingly busy months (as if I have any other kind).

After the summer was over and the fall routine settled in again, I sat down to write my "sorry I was MIA all summer" post. Then it dawned on me: no one - not friends, family, or distant readers - had commented about the fact that I disappeared for months. I thought about this for a while and realized that Facebook was sufficient for keeping loved ones up to date and my blogging life had probably reached its natural end. I decided to write a final post and call it good, but that post just wouldn't come.

For some reason, people have recently started asking me what happened to the blog and it got me thinking about why I started it in the first place. Certainly not for the fame and glory and money (although if anyone wants to offer me that, I won't refuse). Mainly it's a diary of our life. I realized that so much of the boys' first few years were documented, while Miren's first year will soon be fuzzied by mommy amnesia.

So I'm back - even if it's just to satisfy my own navel-gazing and family journaling needs.

With that in mind, here are a few of the most important moments of our last year...

We got the world's coolest bike. And despite my tricycle past, I can actually ride it:

Took a trip to Mackinac Island with my parents:

In front of the Mackinac Bridge.

Held Miren's Dedication:

Celebrated Robbie's 30th Birthday:

Had one family reunion or family party after another:

Celebrating Grandma Marion's 80th Birthday

We remodeled our only (and incredibly tiny) bathroom, forcing us to travel to our neighbor's empty bathroom (they were in Europe) every night for bathtime for months. Our children decided that most of the trips needed to be done naked, which our neighbors doubtless appreciated:

The crappy "Before" picture.

The equally crappy "After" picture.

Fionn started his first year of preschool:

  

 

Emerson made huge gains in all areas and got a wonderful kindergarten placement for next year. I pushed for more testing in the fall and - as I suspected all along - he qualified for autism spectrum services. More on that later:

The handsome man himself.

Miren learned how to do all the important baby things:

Miren also learned that her smile could help her get away with pretty much anything:

Once mobile, she quickly dispelled the myth that at least one out of three kids is bound to be easy:

Miren enjoys her first Popsicle.

I celebrated my 30th Birthday. It was not quite as exciting as Robbie's :) :

We lost our beloved "Mama:"

Mama meets newborn Emerson for the first time.

Fionn earned the title "World's Best Big Brother:"

Fionn shares his Valentine's sucker.

We enjoyed visiting friends and drinking good beer in Wisconsin:

Fionn enjoys the view of Milwaukee from his "bubble" in Discovery World.

We decided to rip up our entire yard and fill it full of edible plants and perennial flowers (pics coming).

The boys got to go on their first fishing trip thanks to dad and papa:

I continued to slog through grad school classes and finally decided the focus of my ministry will be the environment:

I started a Michigan chapter of Kidical Mass (kidicalmass.org):

The kids help me run the booth at "Bike Bash."

Families setting off on our first ride.

And in general we had some crazy fun:

Miren's first Easter egg hunt.

April Fool's Parade

Robbie brought the boys some wrestling masks from Mexico.

Christmas chaos.

Feel more caught up than you ever needed to be? Good. Now hopefully I'll write again before next year.

Happy Father's Day

Seven years ago, I was sitting in a bowling alley on some godawful date and I started thinking about what qualities I wanted for my future husband/father of my kids. I had just escaped a horrible on-again off-again relationship of more than two years, so I already knew what I didn't want.

As I stared into the computer screen pretending to keep score, I suddenly thought, "I want someone as good as my dad." I had dated a wide variety of guys, but no one had ever come close to being as good as my dad.

A few weeks later, I met Robbie. Now I have two of the world's greatest men in my life and two little boys who will follow in their footsteps. Happy Father's Day!

Happy Mother's Day

To the world's most beautiful mom

Be True to Your School

These days, I spend most of my time like this:

I have many fascinating and brilliant things to write about (stop snickering), but lately I've been so swamped with three kids and three classes that I just can't get to it. Seriously, I'm so sleep deprived that I developed what I call a "slutter" - a slur and a stutter mixed together. You could arguably add "slut" in there, but that's another story from another time period.

For the most part I love being in school and wish I could be a professional student (unfortunately Robbie curls into the fetal position whenever I say the word "Ph.D.") I'm in no hurry to graduate, but when I have insane weeks like the past couple weeks, I find myself obsessively checking how many classes I have left until graduation. The answer is always the same: too many. 

I spent the first half of grad school at a seminary on the University of Chicago campus in Hyde Park. I loved commuting there for intensives every January, but the commute - combined with major changes that the school made after the recession hit - became too much for me last year. I transferred to an ecumenical seminary in Detroit that I was already attending as a guest student. 

Hyde Park could look rough if you went too many blocks in any given direction, but for the most part it was a gorgeous, affluent campus. Many of my classmates affectionately called our seminary "Hogwarts" after the old gothic building and the old rumpled staff. 

Now I go to school in an old church in downtown Detroit where most of the neighborhoods are rough. I'm only one of a couple non-Christians, which can be frustrating and lonely sometimes. But there are a lot of things I love about the seminary: the energy, the activism, the racial diversity...the groundskeeper whose name really is Willie. 

Last Saturday after class I took some pictures of the Heidelberg Art Project going on next to the school. The shoes represent people living on the street, but you can find better information about it here.

Typical of the area - one abandoned, one beautifully renovated.

While I was at it, I took some pictures of our school. It's no Hogwarts...but it has a magic all its own. 

The Seven Year Itch

At midnight, Robbie and I marked our anniversary with the following exchange:

"Robbie, are you ever coming to bed?"

"Yeah, I'm just flossing."

"Oh, ok. Bring the nasal aspirator with you when you come upstairs."

"The what?"

"The nasal aspirator...the snot sucker for the baby."

"Oh, ok."

And End Scene


Seven years ago, it was a gray and wet Leap Day in Utah. We spent the morning digging my car out of a snow bank, then we hit the road with a sparkly polyester wedding dress and Robbie's crushed velvet tux hanging in the backseat. As we merged onto the freeway headed for Las Vegas, I popped in a CD so we could sing "Going to the Chapel" at the top of our lungs. Somewhere in the middle of the southern Utah desert, Robbie called his mom to tell her he had been dating this girl named Cassi for the past two weeks. He thought it was best to introduce us considering the phone call he would be making to her later on that night.

In our 22-year-old minds, we thought we were going to pull off the greatest practical joke ever. Seven years and three kids later, turns out the joke was on us.



Sucking snot out of a small child at 1am is certainly a far cry from sucking down cocktails the size of a small child in Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville at 1am. But either way it's painful to get out of bed the next morning.



Happy Anniversary dear!

Warning: A Whole Lot of Belly

I've been meaning to post these for a while, so thank you for the reminder Mashawna! I didn't take many pictures this pregnancy, but these will at least give an impression of my hugeness over the past few months. Luckily I haven't gained much weight lately and the baby dropped, so my fears of physically exploding while bending over to put on my shoes haven't come true. Yet.

Around 34 weeks




Around 36 weeks


Today (38.5 weeks)
Don't judge the pajamas - they were on sale


Fionn saw my exposed belly and decided it was a fun toy. Especially my gigantic belly button.

Happy Lusse Natt

I'm all about traditions and family heritage and other such sappiness - especially this time of year. Now that the boys are getting old enough to begin to understand traditions, I decided it was time to celebrate the Scandinavian holiday Lusse Natt (Lussinatta, St. Lucia Day, St. Lucy Night - the names are numerous.)

The holiday began as an early Pagan celebration of a witch figure named Lussi who came out at night on December 13 (Winter Solstice according to the Julian calendar at the time). It was thought to be dangerous to be out in the dark between Lussi night and Yule (later called Christmas) because evil spirits like Lussi and her companions were active at this time. Households kept the spirits away by feasting and drinking at night, lighting candles, and finishing holiday preparations early. Children were warned not to be naughty or Lussi would come down the chimney and take them away. (She pre-dates the legend of St. Nicholas in case you're wondering.)

Later on, the Christians adapted the Pagan story of Lussi into the story of the martyr St. Lucia. According to one popular version of her story, she brought food to the persecuted Christians hiding out in the catacombs in Rome. To keep her hands free for carrying food, she wore a crown of candles in her hair.


Traditional St. Lucia Day celebration

No matter which version of the story you focus on, her name means "light" and the celebration represents the eternal struggle between darkness and light. This was a major theme in the brutal northern countries, so I suppose it was fitting that we spent our Lusse Natt trapped inside the house due to snow and below zero temperatures.

Normally the focus of the day is a morning procession led by the eldest daughter, who dresses up as St. Lucia and brings the parents a breakfast of coffee and Lussekater buns. But since we don't have a daughter to dress up yet, and since we are not exactly morning people, we put the focus on dinner. The day is often used to perform good deeds and/or deliver presents, but my plans for that also dissolved when the temperatures plummeted.

Instead, we spent the day baking cookies for Emerson's teachers and bus drivers (he loves to bake cookies almost as much as he loves to eat cookies). I was too lazy to get some saffron for the Lussekater, so instead I tried my hand at making a traditional Swedish cardamom bread. Despite a momentary panic attack when I couldn't remember how to do a simple braid, at least one out of the two loaves turned out looking the way it was supposed to. We gave that one as a gift to neighbors who lived in Sweden for many years and ate the ugly one ourselves.






In the traditional procession, boys dress up as Stjärngossar (Star Boys), so the boys used their creativity to color stars and I relied on Robbie's superior geometry skills to fashion rudimentary cone hats.








Before dinner we had a minor "procession" that mainly consisted of me throwing on their costumes and snapping pictures as quickly as possible before they were destroyed.



Emerson was convinced his hat was a birthday hat and kept singing the birthday song. Fionn ripped his hat and we broke two electric candles in less than 5 minutes, but all I cared about was documenting the moment. I figure at this age they don't remember much, but if I can show them pictures of it in years to come, they will form memories around the images instead. I mean think about it - whenever you look at pictures of vacations and events later on, you have much more positive feelings about it than you did when it was actually happening. At least I hope that's true for other people because I'm going to rely on it heavily during their childhood...



We ate a simple Scandinavian dinner of salmon with dill, cardamon bread, warmed glogg, and Pepparkakor (gingerbread biscuits). I cheated and bought the cookies instead of making them, but the various shapes they come in were a huge hit with the boys. It was a good thing they played with their polar bears and snowmen so much since it prevented them from downing a hundred cookies in one sitting.



I can't wait to make up a tiny candle crown for our daughter next year, and hopefully bring more meaning to the celebration for the boys. In the meantime, my hard work explaining Christmas this year has finally paid off. The boys have showed almost no interest, but then yesterday Emerson announced that "It's Christmas time and Santa brings us presents." When he started throwing balls down the stairs later on, I asked him to please stop. His temper has been atrocious the past couple weeks, so I was bracing for battle. Instead he considered the situation for a moment and then said, "Ok, I can't throw balls down the stairs. Santa brings us presents."

As much as I hate the fact that women do 90% of the work for the holidays and then give all the credit to some fat old white guy, there are times when I appreciate Santa Claus. A lot.

Speaking of holiday preparations, while I have been busy handling cards and shopping and wrapping, Robbie was busy doing this:



Ok, to be fair, he did (begrudgingly) help me put up the tree and decorate it. And he nodded when I would ask his opinion on gifts, but most of his festive energy went into this. His work had an "Ugly Christmas Sweater" contest, so not only did he buy an ugly sweater, he also hot glued ornaments and presents on it to make it 3D. Then he fashioned a portable light system to make the lights he glued on the collar actually glow.

Incidentally, while he was shopping for the sweater in Value World, he saw a woman standing in the aisle without any pants. Then he brought home his goods and made the final product without even washing the sweater first. Pray our family doesn't spend Christmas infested with...something.